The Upland South: the Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape.

The Upland South: The Making of an American Folk Region and Landscape. By Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov. (Santa Fe, N.Mex., and Harrisonburg, Va.: Center for American Places in association with the University of Virginia Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 121. $30.00, ISBN 1-930066-08-2.)

In The Upland South, geographer Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov seeks to describe and map a distinctive cultural region of the United States. He identifies the Upland South as a region that "stretches from the Fall Line, at the inner margin of the Atlantic coastal plain, through southern Appalachia, across the Ohio River into southern Indiana and Illinois, where it is nearly severed in two at the 'isthmus' of the Shawnee Hills, and then southwestward through the Ozarks, Ouachitas, and the Hill Country of Texas" (p. 6).

The unique culture of this region developed through the melding of a variety of cultural influences, as individuals from various ethnic backgrounds migrated into the region from the lower Delaware River valley, the Chesapeake Tidewater, and the Carolina Lowcountry. The cultures these immigrants brought with them became involved in a process of "fermentation and coalescence" into a recognizable regional culture in the Watauga region of southwestern Virginia, northwestern North Carolina, and upper East Tennessee in the 1770s (p. 9). The constituent cultures were blended further "through intermarriage and acculturation ... into a single distinct new population and culture" in Middle Tennessee in the early years of the nineteenth century (pp. 9-10). From here the culture spread west and north. For Jordan-Bychkov it is the "mixing," fermenting, and coalescing of a variety of cultural influences over time that provide the key to understanding the Upland South's distinctive culture (p. 9). Indeed, he argues that any idea of "subconscious persistence" of Celtic culture in the region is "nonsense" and "bizarre" (pp. 9, 10).

In order to trace the paths of cultural formation and transmission, Jordan-Bychkov examines and tracks the presence of five major artifacts of the Upland South's "traditional cultural landscape": the half-dovetail notch used in log construction, the dogtrot house, the transverse-crib barn, the Shelbyville-style town square, and the graveshed--"a small, low, roofed structure with its sides either open or enclosed by pickets, lattices, boards, or wire" (pp. 22, 76). Jordan-Bychkov prefers mapping culture in this way as opposed to using the surveys often favored by other social scientists. Defending his methodology, he asserts that "People often lie, if unintentionally, but their artifacts, if correctly read and interpreted, invariably tell the truth" (p. 22). By mapping and tracking the origins and diffusion of these artifacts, Jordan-Bychkov convincingly reveals the sometimes surprising cultural interconnections of a large geographical area.

In The Upland South, Terry Jordan-Bychkov has synthesized a career's worth of research to produce an important work on the roots and transmission of culture in the region. In only eighty-five pages of text he simply and clearly presents a very convincing case. In addition, the methodologies used in this book--particularly the concepts of ethnogenesis and cultural hearths--should provide valuable tools for cultural historians of the South or any region.

DANIEL S. PIERCE

University of North Carolina at Asheville